The Green Monster

The Green Monster

So yeah, it’s a funny story really. Not so much funny in a “Ha Ha” kind of way more of a funny “Oh my god why is this nonsense continue to do this!? Why is the universe dicking with me?” So I loaded up my newly fixed Shiney (sic) laptop and first things first, I copied over the entire Paper Zeppelin project (all of the gigs!) over to flash drive to avoid, let’s say unpleasantness. However, I realized that the screen was green. Like, no reds or purples or anything that wasn’t green and blue and sad. Missing out on those colors kind of sucks when you need to code stuff that looks like anything.“No problem,” I say to myself. Out loud even much to my surprise. I shut my computer down and open it up. The first time I took it apart it took me a day and a half. This most recent time and I had it in a bunch of pieces all over my table in about 20 minutes. Practice makes perfect I guess, although I would really rather have no idea how to take this apart, but I digress.Found the cord that sends all the pretty up to the monitor and discovered some stuff. 1) If you press on the cord, it touches the motherboard and shorts it. It’s stupid, and the laptop didn’t mind. What it did mind was 2) It sparked up again and made smoke. This time though I had the guts all spread eagled out in front of me.Learned something interesting regarding laptops and electronics in general, although I need to go back a bit. When I took Shiney (sic) apart the first time I discovered that the fan was clogged with giant dust bunnies and I assumed that those were what had caught fire the first time. However, I found no signs of burning anywhere on those little bunnies. “That’s odd,” I said at the time. Now, I know why.So back to that screen cord. In a laptop the power cord and the message cord are the same cord (but not the same chord obviously since they make different noises). While I watched it spark up like like a Roman Candle I saw exactly where it was happening. So unplugged again and started looking at that cord, and took apart the screen to get to it.What really happened the last time was that the cords melted from the heat. It cooked the heat shield like a digital hibachi grill and melted the cords like they were Darkman. Then they shorted out, which cause electrical sparks which raised the heat and blasted those poor bastard cords with more heat and violence and rendered them hopelessly boned. The fact that it worked at all really speaks to the intestinal fortitude of wee lil Shiney.So yeah, that’s what happened and now the replacement part is incoming. Until then I think I’ll just start building levels on my ultrabook since I’m tired of waiting around for it.